Chris Taylor hints at Total Annihilation follow-up

Gas Powered Games president Chris Taylor, former lead designer at RTS developer Cavedog, has told an audience of academics at Redmond, Washington's DigiPen Institute of Technology that his company is working on "an RTS follow-up to Total Annihilation".

Responding to a question from a student, who asked if we would ever see a sequel to legendary RTS Total Annihilation, Taylor not only said that Gas Powered Games was working on such a project, but that it already has a publisher and would be unveiled in the near future.

Total Annihilation 2 has been hotly disputed and roundly lusted after ever since Cavedog's unfortunate demise. A couple of years ago it all looked ready to get going, with Kingdom Under Fire developer Phantagram reportedly onboard and the game due out in Q4 2004. For reasons unknown however, Phantagram are apparently no longer involved with the project. Atari presumably still has the rights though, given that they bought up the GT Interactive library as Infogrames back before they rebranded.

Whether Taylor was discussing a sanctioned Total Annihilation sequel then is up for debate. More likely he meant a game in the spirit of the original. The project is certainly moving apace, either way. Gas Powered Games is already working on a sequel to its hackandslash Dungeon Siege (trailer available here), but is hiring artists to work on an unspecified RTS project according to this page.

Taylor has already promised a public announcement "soon, within the next few months," perhaps indicating a planned E3 debut. Although he didn't name the publisher attached to the project, his comment that it's "a big one... one that doesn't also publish operating systems," was clearly designed to rule out Dungeon Siege publisher Microsoft, which lives just down the road from where he made his comments.